This is truly a wish-list request and I’m fully prepared to be told it just ain’t possible … which will surely be for the best of reasons, I’m sure …
Through a thread on a macro that a user has written for Nisus Writer Pro, I have learnt that Nisus can use double brackets for enclosing inline comments, whereas Scrivener uses single brackets. It seems too that Martin has posted a couple of macros for switching between inline and external comments, the way that Scrivener can switch between inline and inspector comments. Martin’s macros are dependent on those double brackets, it seems, though I haven’t tried them yet.
Is there any possibility of Scrivener’s being able to compile inline comments with double brackets like Nisus? I realise there may be sound reasons why not, but it would be great if I could compile from Scrivener, where I like my comments to be inline, and then use Martin’s macros to convert them in NWP before I send out the files to collaborators.
Unless I misunderstand you, you can do this a step quicker by just exporting all your annotations as margin notes when you compile. In the Footnotes/Comments setting, assuming you’re compiling to RTF, you can choose from the drop-down menu to have the annotations and comments exported as margin comments (inline and inspector get compiled the same way). When you bring your manuscript into NWP, they’ll show up the way you want to start, without running the macro. In Scrivener, they’ll still be inline.
Actually, I want the flexibility of still having them inline in NWP for myself and being able to convert them into margin notes when I’m ready to send them to collaborators. Also sometimes there are so many that making them margin notes makes the text looks like a spider’s web.
It’s just about flexibility … that’s all. I can try to remember to begin all my annotations with a [ and end them with ] so then they’ll be double on compile, or maybe I could try and work out how to do a search and replace in NWP that would take [text] and turn it into [[text]], which would do what’s necessary, and then macro-ize that, which you can do in NWP.
Just looking for the gilt on the gingerbread. Scrivener and NWP are both incredible programs which work so well together … just turned up this one point where they don’t behave quite the same, and so wondered.
Make a customized version of Martin’s macro to operate on single-brackets.
or
Write a pre-processing macro/script to double all left and right brackets. This would result in just one extra step in your workflow.
–Greg
[[Though I can imagine doing either of the above, I have this funny feeling that, if I was in your position, I would just end up getting used to typing the start and end brackets in my Scriv annotations. Why? Perhaps for the same reason that that I will Delete through a lot of perfectly fine words/characters in order to get back to a typo and then retype the stuff I crushed to get there.]]
Keith, no need to apologise. I haven’t in fact needed to work with these since I wrote the original post — in the UK for the last couple of weeks to meet my granddaughter! — and reading other posts about mark-up for syncing, I think it was, I came to the conclusion that there might be conflicts as that seemed to use [[ and ]] …
But this is fantastic … and I look forward to 2.1 when it materialises! Thank you so much.
